SXSWi Day One: games, data, curation, storytelling … and rain.

As South by Southwest kicks off, Austin is awash in people, flowing with ideas, drenched in jargon and deluged by Mother Nature. It’s raining – a lot. But Texas has suffered mightily from droughts recently, so we’re not complaining.

After meeting for breakfast, our team scattered. “The Toms” (Tom Hynes, blogger relations, and Tom Miale, multimedia engagement ) headed toward one of the hotels for the journalism track. Vicky and I dove headlong into the crowds at the convention center. On tap – sessions about visual storytelling, gamification, video curation, big data and branding.

I attended a session featuring Electronics Arts founder Bing Gordon, who also sits on the boards of Amazon and Zynga, and is an enthusiastic gamer. The conversation covered a lot of ground, and Bing offered some interesting perspective on game mechanics, and the nature of gamers themselves.

Gaming is the new MBA.

Every Fortune 500 company should have a gamer in the C-suite.

Gamers believe constant improvement is possible.

We’re moving from an era in which we learned by listening, into an era in which we learn by doing. Gamers find the edges, and lose quickly. They don’t read manuals. They see a door, and they open it.